Niche Bracket

Because anime blogs aren’t niche enough as-is.

Format notes: Yes, the random seeding of the tourney ensures certain blogs get fucked over in their rounds, while absolute trash sites get to move on in others, but that’s just the way the game has gotta be played.

It would be ever-so-boring if things worked out sensibly~

Round 1 – Match 1

There hasn’t been anything posted here since September, so I think I’m gonna call this one dead.

Since I want to avoid commentary like this in the actual tournament posts (it takes up too much space for what is essentially just stating the blog is inactive), I think it’s time for another mass round of blogs to be disqualified. Having at least three posts over the past three months should be a good qualifier.

I don’t do music review sites, so I can’t really say for sure whether or not Yuki’s comments and criticisms are valid. And simply put, I am not equipped for a discussion of musical merits — I don’t know the terminology, nor do I know the critical reasons behind what kind of music I like or dislike.

What I can comment on is that the reviews mean shit-all when the songs aren’t provided. There should be Youtube videos up for half this stuff, so fucking link them. That way people can follow your criticisms as they listen to the song and determine whether or not they’re valid, and how your opinions match up with theirs.

Expecting your readers to hunt the internet for these songs or take your word at face-value and blindly buy at your advice is insanely hubristic, especially for such a niche genre among English listeners.

I may or may not have forgotten that this blog is only active between July and November. And maybe it’s just straight-up dead, since LuniazKun hasn’t bothered with anything past the 2013 quarterfinals, and the tournament’s already over…

But the concept of blogging about a shitty Japanese-language moe-girls-only contest is cool enough, so Saimoe Update Blog is moving onto the 16th-finals! I mean, if you so choose to vote it there, that is.

Since this site was billed as a Featured Guest at Youmacon 2013 (a con which I had the misery of visiting), I decided to check out if they had a writeup on the event. Turns out they did.

“Bobby, if anyone in our group was the Bidoof, it would be you. You are a Baka of the highest order. You’re just a dung beetle! No, you’re the dung that is being rolled by the dung beetle! AND YOU SMELL! Now back to our regularly scheduled article.”

Keep in mind this quality of writing is why 6 members of 91.8 got an open bar, food, and hotel rooms paid for by the con attendees. Mm, quality fund management~

Wisely spent, indeed.

Ignoring the articles, since 91.8 purports to be a radio station, I decided to click their Listen Now button to grab some tunes to listen to. Three minutes later, I learned shitty music isn’t a genre I’m inclined toward.

I then turned toward an interview, hoping it would be somewhat interesting. Nope. Lasted 45 seconds before the cringe killed me. Goddamn, what the fuck is wrong with this site?

The best part is they have a $20 yearly subscription you can pay for to receive even more QUALITY content. Yeah, don’t quit your day jobs, guys.

It’s hard to recommend a site that reviews manga when the writing is so godawful you have to wonder if the reviewer has read anything but manga…

“Most of the storis are light-hearted and have a bunch of different plots to carry their comedy. In one story, Koizumi helps Kyon try and intentionally rile up Haruhi with asking about her panties. In another the two end up switching bodies and dealing with the groups’ suspicions. Then there are some stories that caught me off-guard with how dramatic and heartfelt they were. In one story the SOS Brigade goes on a treasure hunt, and Koizumi shares with Kyon what personally means the most to him. In the book’s last story, Kyon goes to school and finds two Koizumi’s there. It was so sweet and so sad that I was crushed to have it be so short. These were just a small portion of the books’ contents.”

…and when the author can’t stop fangasming over BL titles while bitching about how “skeevey” ecchi titles are. Wonder how that justification worked out in her head.

The news section is thankfully more bearable. Updates are focused around American/Canadian manga industry news, with solid editorializing. So if following the latest activities of Yen Press is totally your thing, you might find something of value here. But considering that not even I give a fuck about domestic manga market news, I’m not seeing much of an audience for this stuff.

Round 1 – Match 2

The Otaku’s Study is a news blog with a focus on otaku-related subjects for Australians. Namely, anime, manga, and gaming news. While there’s enough being pushed out that you could probably forgive the PR-friendly, soulless writing, the site’s design cripples it in comparison to other news blogs.

Clicking into what is labeled as more pages will indeed load older posts, but the URL doesn’t change, and the site doesn’t remember which page you were on when you click away.

So let’s say you decide to browse five pages into the site and find an article you want to read. You click on it, read the info, and then click back, expecting to be placed where you were last at. Nope. The site forces you back to the main page, leaving you to guess what page you were on if you don’t remember.

Like most blogs I’ve had the misery of encountering over the course of this magnificent tournament, the spelling and grammar are shot, and the writing isn’t worth reading. I don’t think Erica’s even ever had a thought that lasted more than 5 sentences. Take this rambling as an example:

“Yes, it makes perfect sense that they chose the ‘surprise birthday party’ story for Pinkie Pie, but every time I read or watch that stoopid story, my teeth grit harder. The lesson of that dumb episode is not ‘you should trust your friends and not come up with paranoid fantasies.’

The true lesson of this story is this: Surprise birthday parties are evil, terrible things, and people should not throw them.”

Erica attempts to combat this problem with a steady stream of yuri-related news and commentary. And it works… quite fucking well.

While I don’t much care enough about yuri to spend time looking for news and series that focus on the subject, if you are a diehard yuri fan you will love this site. Or at least tolerate it enough to get something of value from it.

Veto creates guitar tabs for anime/Japanesey songs and then posts the original audio along with a color-coded translation of the lyrics. There’s so much going on here, and in a good way, that it’s pretty hard not to appreciate what Veto’s going for.

Danganronpa 2 will be better than the first just cuz of this girl.

I can’t say it’s my style of blog, but if you’re intrigued by the description it’s worth a visit.

“What makes this interesting is that I could totally relate to Shio, being a blogger and have blogger friends whom he had also met IRL. He likes speculating about other people and he claims that it is his hobby to read them. Good thing is that Shio never wavered as the uke. He does not become girly and suddenly head over heels in love with Miya. He certainly changed but not really. lol get my point? XD;;”

Round 1 – Match 3

God, I forgot how much I hate podcasts. I chose to listen to a con review for Ayacon 2013 because that sounded like an interesting topic. But it took these pricks 15 minutes to get to talking about the con itself. Get to the fucking point; I don’t care how much you like Attack on Titan when I picked a convention podcast to listen to.

Though the topic does have some relevance, considering half the cosplayers dress up as Shingeki characters at pretty much every con now.

The episode was okay from about ~27:00 to 28:00, but by the 30-minute mark I’d heard enough. Here’s some tips, guys, since you obviously hadn’t learned a fucking thing in the 105 podcast episodes leading up to that one:

1. Have some sort of a fucking script to work off of. “Free flow” podcasts are only a good idea if everyone’s innately on the same page of where to go to make it entertaining for their audience.

2. I dunno, I’m not much into podcasts. Refer back to tip 1, cuz that’s really what you need to focus on most.

Podcasts are a huge time commitment for listeners, so you need to bring your fucking A-game. This episode didn’t even hit D-tier.

SG Cafe is a great news site for Singapore otaku, so long as you guys don’t mind that every article reads like (or actually is) just copy-pasted PR.

“IS: Infinite Stratos‘ resident German super soldier, Laura Bodewig gets her own PVC figure from Penguin Parade and she will definitely try to make you her bride, no discussions. This 1/8 scale PVC figure is sculpted by Penguin Parade and measures in at approximately 190mm. Laura is presented having an embarassed face while wearing her black two-piece bikini from season 1′s beach episode.”

Thanks for the run-down, Penguin Parade~

Figure announcements are the blog’s primary content, but they also post news you saw weeks ago on Siliconera or AnimeNewsNetwork.

If this all sounds awesome to you, I don’t know what’s wrong with your brain.

As a fellow manga collector, I wanted to love this site. Too bad I couldn’t find a single thing of value.

Shin, if you’re going to make a blog about buyfagging, you have to understand it needs to be relevant to someone other than you. Seeing other people’s collections is cool enough for about a minute or two, but there’s not much to offer in a site where all you do is look at pictures of things one person bought. And that’s about all you’ve got.

I dunno, try making a Let’s Read video or something. Until then, I don’t see why anyone would visit your site.

Nabe tries to be another shitty megablog and only really succeeds at the first part.

Whether it’s blogging about how Diabolik Lovers is a good anime or boring episode summaries masquerading as reviews, Nabe’s only admirable quality is that it finds a way to make sure it’s the poor opinions you pay attention to, rather than the complete lack of actual content being posted. (I’m afraid that teasers and still alive posts aren’t helping you guys bring in any new readers.)

Having a large variety of content makes sense in theory (creating a one-stop aniblog is a good enough idea), but if you can’t back it up with compelling content that makes people actually want to visit, a scattered focus only hurts the site. Even after having browsed through the last six pages of content, I couldn’t put my finger on what the blog’s core competency is, or a reason to keep reading.

I started this podcast and forgot it was a podcast until the Golden Time ED song ended. What the fuck, you guys? That shit’s supposed to last like 10 seconds max, not a minute and a half.

20 minutes of rambling later and I had to shut it off. When I turn on an anime podcast, I expect anime-related talk. I don’t need to hear a bunch of weird guys ramble on about how they’ve been doing podcasts for 8 years or how good their class rings make them look. The only thing a class ring makes you look is old. There. Now you now.

There’s nothing else to the site other than podcasts and their mascot. And considering what she looks like…

Pre-op or post-op: guess

…I think we’re gonna call Anime Pulse inarguably avoidable.

Round 1 – Match 4

This is a photoblog dedicated to cosplayers, and not a very good one. The minimally engaging format of each post — one picture, a short summary of the character being cosplayed, and info on who the cosplayer is — never changes, and the pictures are just randomly gathered from the internet, meaning there’s little reason to visit this site instead of Google Images.

Giving me chapters is great, but when your player doesn’t show timestamps, what fucking good does that do me?

Yes, this is the player.

The poor chemistry in this podcast made me wish the two hosts had been making meth instead of bad dialogue. The pauses between sentences created an awkward tension and THE CRACklinG of the MICs certainly didn’t assist in winning me over. Guess I should’ve known the concept — episodic reviews in audio format — wouldn’t pan out.

At least the podcast taught me something: every neo-feminist male needs a female voice of reason on the show, or the content of each episode would solely be him whining about how oppressed and unfairly sexualized anime girls are. Seriously, if you need to be offended on behalf of fictional characters, you’re doing life wrong.

Another anime music review blog… but with Pokemon. Unlike Tsukiyo or Melodia though, the reviews feel more like phoned-in summaries than anything. And the addition of stupid Pokemon commentary…

“Glalie as a pure Ice-type is a really defensie and fun Pokemon to use, but the design kind of heavily reminds me of Forretress >.> Snorunt is adorable and the fact Ash had captured one made me love it even more!”

This is the first podcast I had to stop listening to because I didn’t have more time to waste. Sometimes hearing people complain about how their lives suck and how things just keep getting worse is entertaining enough to warrant lending an ear to.

I don’t bother with podcasts, but if I did, I might consider listening to this one.

I primarily lazily hit a button every month that copies posts from one site to that another while I wonder if I will renew the domain for the year. I don’t think that counts as blogging, anime or otherwise.

If I am “salty” (whatever that is) it is over being labelled an “aniblog” and being lumped in with the likes of you and the rest of wastrels on this site.